Attracting over 70 of the world's biggest financial institutions to its consortium in just over a year, R3 has accomplished a formidable task. Aiming to rethink the fabric of the financial system, they first conducted experiments testing blockchain platforms for their member and last year began developing their own distributed ledger platform: Corda.

The effort to build Corda was lead by R3 CTO Richard Brown and the former Bitcoin developer and R3 lead architect Mike Hearn. In a wide-ranging discussion, we covered the vision of the project and why it represents a radical departure from existing blockchain platforms.

Topics covered included:

The origin story of R3

Why existing blockchain designs didn't meet their needs

How the R3 team lead a design effort to develop a new platform from scratch

Bitcoin Core 0.13.1 was released last week, which means miner signaling on the proposed SegregatedWitness (SegWit) soft fork will start soon. If activated, SegWit offers a number of benefits, one of which is an effective block size limit increase to about 1.6 to 2 megabytes, depending on the types of transactions included in blocks.

If and when Segregated Witness is activated on the Bitcoin network, users will be able to take advantage of the added network capacity immediately — if their wallets are “SegWit-ready.” For users to enjoy this added block space, therefore, much will depend on Bitcoin wallet providers.

On GitHub, 25 wallets have indicated they will integrate SegWit. To poll their progress, Bitcoin Magazine reached out to a selection of them.

State of Readiness

Depending on miner signaling, Segregated Witness may, at the very soonest, be “live” on the Bitcoin network halfway through December. This somewhat unlikely best-case scenario leaves about six weeks for Bitcoin wallets to update their software.

The wallet providers that Bitcoin Magazine reached out to generally expected this should be sufficient time. Several of them are even ready to go already, or are in the final stages of development.

GreenAddress, the wallet provider that was recently acquired by infrastructure development company Blockstream, was among the first wallets to have completed Segregated Witness support, as early as February this year.

Speaking to Bitcoin Magazine, developer Lawrence Nahum said that GreenAddress users will be able to receive and send SegWit transactions as soon as the soft fork is deployed on the Bitcoin network. After that, he plans to improve the wallet, further utilizing the possibilities offered by Segregated Witness, such as MAST, Schnorr signatures, and theLightningNetwork.

“I am very eager to make use of all good things in SegWit,” Nahum said. “I see it as a great stepping stone towards better fungibility and privacy, which I think are as important as — if not more important than — capacity increases.”

Regarding SegWit-readiness itself, Nahum added:

“Integration was quite easy. Desktop, iOS, and Android: All our wallets’ GitHub master branches support SegWit already, and recently we finalised some integration testing with hardware wallets such as Ledger to make sure it all works.”

Most of the other wallet providers contacted by Bitcoin Magazine also indicated they should be SegWit-ready if and when the soft fork activates, or not too long after. BTC.com — formerly known as Blocktrail — has been experiencing some delays due to the recent acquisition by ASIC-manufacturor Bitmain, but said that integration shouldn’t take much longer than several weeks. Electrum, the popular desktop and Android wallet, will include Segregated Witness support in the next major release, planned before the end of the year. BreadWallet, a wallet app available on Android and iOS, is in the testing stage, and will offer SegWit to users once it’s activated and deemed absolutely secure. AndMycelium, also available on iOS and Android, said it wrapped up the complicated part of integration, with only some user interface questions remaining.

Payment processor BitPay confirmed its intention to integrate SegWit as well for its Copay wallet and the new BitPay wallet, but the company is taking a slightly more conservative approach. Speaking to Bitcoin Magazine, BitPay CEO Stephen Pair explained that they will only start integration once it is more certain that the soft fork will actually activate.

“We do plan to support SegWit. The timeline for that support will be driven by the activation of the required soft fork,” Pair said, “but we don't know exactly when the activation will occur, so we don't want to spend time now only to have it take another six months or a year before activation happens.”

Increased Complexity

In order to be able to deploy Segregated Witness as a soft fork, the Bitcoin Core developers opted to place a reference to signature data in a somewhat odd part of Bitcoin blocks. Although this does not make the solution insecure, it does add some complexity to Bitcoin’s code-base, but the added effort for the wallet providers is not extreme.

Most of the complexity is “hidden inside” the open-source software libraries many wallets rely on. Several of these libraries have already integrated Segregated Witness support, and others should be able to include it within a few weeks.

Ruben de Vries is a developer for BTC.com, and one of the maintainers of the bitcoinjs JavaScript library. At BTC.com he also works with Thomas Kerin, lead maintainer of the Bitcoin-php library. Speaking to Bitcoin Magazine, de Vries said:

“Bitcoin-php has been ready for months. Bitcoinjs is pending review and some discussion because there are some backwards compatibility breaks. We could have it ready as soon as next week, though. For wallets, the change is very minor, technically. Looking purely at transaction building and signing, SegWit adds a bit of complexity, but not that much. Really, only full-node developers and projects have to bear with the full complexity.”

As a general sentiment, wallet developers seemed to agree that the Segregated Witness solution is somewhat “hacky” — but worth it. “I consider SegWit to be ‘Bitcoin 1.0;’ it's fixing a couple of issues that are like ‘beta bugs,’” de Vries said.

For Mycelium, Daniel Weigl has done most of the SegWit integration:

“When — in a SegWit-world — a new developer learns about Bitcoin and how things work, he or she will stumble over a lot of strange things that will not be self-explanatory without knowing what transactions and blocks looked like before SegWit,” Weigl said. “That adds barriers to entry in an already complicated topic. But I’m no friend of hard forks either, so I also would not know how we could solve that without those quirks.”

Amid the steady rise of blockchain innovation, there are growing concerns about a looming shortage of qualified developers. With demand for talent outstripping supply, many companies are having to dial back blockchain related projects that are poised and strategically positioned for a rapid market launch.

In his book The Business Blockchain, thought leader and author, William Mougayar, briefly explores this emerging trend, noting that by his mid-2016 estimates, there were only “5,000 developers dedicated to writing software for cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, or blockchain in general.” He admits that “perhaps another 20,000 had dabbled with the technology, or have written front end applications that connect with the blockchain.”

All of this, he says, pales in comparison with the nine million Java developers worldwide, and about 18.5 million software developers in the world. But as the book documents, there is a silver lining of good news, namely, the blockchain’s good fortune of being tied to languages and scripts that are already in popular use — like Java, Javascript, C++, Node.js, Python, Golang and Haskell.

Says Mougayar, “Getting more developers proficient on Blockchain technology is key, and part of its successful evolution. We can't avoid not having a critical mass of knowledgeable software engineers that know how to program blockchains and develop blockchain applications. Whereas it might take a few weeks of effort today to get a seasoned developer up to speed on blockchains, it might eventually take only two days.”

Mougayar believes that efforts to address the prevailing blockchain developer shortage can be impacted by the following:

Steven Nerayoff, Founder and CEO of Maple Ventures, a Venture Capital firm primarily focused on emerging blockchain-based technologies and payment systems, says the blockchain developer shortage is quite evident among many early stage companies he interacts with. “If you take high level programmers and cryptographers, like Gavin Wood, or someone who works for DARPA or NSA out of the equation, you’re now talking about only a few hundred people that truly understand this blockchain development at a foundational level. That’s such a small group of people for a technology niche that could significantly change how people organize and live their lives.”

Nerayoff goes on to say that this talent shortage is such that there are more projects in the blockchain space than people who are qualified to contribute. He does believe, though that this problem will slowly balance itself out as more and more qualified people migrate out of the government sector, and matriculate from colleges and universities.

Nerayoff says that the prevailing shortage will continue to be acute for those startups working on what he calls “uninteresting projects.”

“As an advisor to Ethereum, I can personally tell you that people were fighting to get onboard there. They had no problems getting qualified programmers. The same with Lisk. They’re a little younger than Ethereum, but as I’m observing their hiring spree right now, there are lots of people who are excited to go work there in large part because they’re cultivating so many new ideas and fresh approaches. In my opinion, the best programmers always want to go to the most interesting projects, while others will continue to struggle to hire people.”

Nako Mbelle, Founder and CEO of the Toronto-based Fintech Recruiters, sees the daily challenges businesses face in recruiting and retaining top (blockchain) developer talent. She says that Python developer shortages are particularly acute, and that her firm has also been receiving requests for functional developers in Haskell and Scala, two niche areas which she says are particularly hard to find. Erlang, Golang and Python are among the other most commonly requested skills. “These functional programming skills seem to be all the rage these days.”

According to Mbelle geographical demand is greatest in the U.S., particularly in New York City, followed by London and the UK. Strangely enough, she says, her firm is getting requests from as far away as Tokyo, Japan.

So what needs to take place in order to address these shortage concerns moving forward? Says Mbelle: “Companies and startups should offer more mentorship programs for developers who are just learning functional programming skills. There are simply not enough software developer internships available. Everyone wants someone with three to five years hands-on experience, yet they often won't give developers who are trying to cross-over into the fintech space a chance to prove themselves.”

Mbelle continues: “In order to attract talent, startups should be flexible about remote working options. We're seeing a trend where startups want people in the office in order to build a corporate culture. However, the more experience a software developer has; the more likely they will want to work remotely, or have very flexible working environments.”

With respect to the long-term picture surrounding this talent shortage, she concludes: “I believe that more and more fintech companies will open up offices in Eastern Europe and Russia, because that seems to be where many developers are from and currently located. I think we'll also see more Functional Programming (training) bootcamps open up. And hopefully there will be more software developer mentoring and internship programs geared toward developers seeking to get into the space.”

Agentic Group LLC Is a global membership-driven consortium providing insight and consulting to corporations, non-profit organizations and government agencies seeking to understand and leverage emerging blockchain applications and digital currencies. Rik Willard, its founder and managing director, believes that the shortage is temporary. “Sure I think there is a shortage. But I think, as the space evolves, you’re going to find that the numerous non-profits and other learning outlets that are teaching blockchain technologies will have an impact on this issue.”

Willard says that what the blockchain world is facing at present in terms of talent deficiencies is much like what took place during the early days of the web. “There weren’t that many developers on the web in the early days. So various schools, academies, and groups got involved and began minting qualification certificates for the internet, ultimately leading to a massive influx of skilled programmers.”

Shidan Gouran is an angel investor with several blockchain startups and innovative tech firms, as well as the organizer of the Blockchain Event, a North American conference series. Gouran says that he doesn’t subscribe to the notion of a programmer shortage. “I hear people say that but in my experience there are lots of talented developers out there who are not involved with the blockchain space because it, frankly, isn’t important enough for them to be involved with.”

He notes that there is nothing inherently more difficult about blockchain than there is with any other type of development. “You don’t have to be a cryptography wizard to understand how to develop a blockchain; you just have to know how to use cryptographic protocols. That’s something that people have been doing forever.”

He says that the blockchain value proposition needs to make more commercial sense in order to get more programmers and developers involved. “More than anything, I think there is a shortage of good ideas. If a startup has a project that’s interesting and can really impact commerce and lives, then qualified people will sign on to start working on it.”

“I’ve often said that we need fewer white papers and more code,” said Gouran. “We need people who are starting projects and actually seeing them through rather than just doing crowd sales, raising money and kind of squandering it away, which we’re seeing a lot of nowadays. Ultimately that’s what I believe will attract top talent to this space.”

Tonight we talk with the StashCrypto team Chris Odom, Cliff (Batman) Baltzley and Justus Ranvier about the "Stash Node Pro" an exciting new innovation in not only Crypo Software but Crypto Hardware as well. "It's a Bank in a Box". This is not just your run of the mill wallet. It hosts a full Bitcoin node with large block capabilities, as well as multiple other functions, including end to end encrypted messaging hosted on your own personal server via the Tor network.

Zcash (ZEC), the new digital currency lauded for its privacy features, is launching today amidst some massive hype. But until enough tokens become available on exchanges, Zcash enthusiasts are poised to acquire their ZEC first-hand by mining for it, either by setting up a home rig or by signing up for a cloud mining contract.

Created from a fork in the Bitcoin chain, Zcash promises all the best features and stability of Bitcoin with the added bonus of total payment confidentiality. Zcash transactions automatically hide the sender, recipient and value of all transactions on the blockchain. Only those with the correct view key can see the contents.

Another interesting aspect of Zcash is it uses a memory-hard proof-of-work known as Equihash. This means the best hardware for mining Zcash tokens is standard GPUs and RAM. The hope is this will lead to a more decentralized set of miners.

“We think it is unlikely that anyone will be able to build cost-effective custom hardware (ASICs) for mining in the foreseeable future,” Zcash CEO and founder, Zooko Wilcox, and software engineer, Jack Grigg, wrote in a blog post.

Since Zcash did not hold an initial crowdfund like Ethereum, every Zcash token issued will be as a result of mining. And it’s likely that mining, especially in the early days, will be cheaper than purchasing Zcash on an exchange.

Mining for ZEC

There are two ways to mine Zcash: you can build your own GPU rig — arguably, with good mining software, you can use a CPU as well, but more on that later — or you can mine Zcash in the cloud.

Building your own GPU is not easy. When you buy an ASIC for mining bitcoin, you simply connect it to the internet and plug in the power. But GPU mining is a custom setup, where you need to source motherboards and graphic cards.

Because of the work involved, cloud mining might make more sense for most people. To that end, several cloud GPU providers are open for Zcash business. Genesis Mining is offering a limited number of one-year contracts. Toomim Brothers is offering Zcash cloud mining on three, six and 12 month contracts.

Adding a twist to cloud mining, Nicehash acts like a hashing broker, letting miners sell their hashing power to anyone willing to buy it. Nicehash is offering Zcash hashing power on a no-contract basis.

ZeroPond is also offering Zcash cloud contracts, but only to those outside of the United States. Additionally, Slushpool, a service that allows miners to pool their hashing power so they can mine blocks more consistently, is also supporting Zcash.

Mining will begin with a “slow start,” which limits the block rewards for the first 20,000 blocks (roughly 34 days). During that time, the block reward will gradually increase from 0 ZEC to 12.5 ZEC.

Typically, when a coin first launches, mining difficulty is at its lowest and rises over a few days or weeks. A slow start discourage the big outfits from dedicating all their resources to mining in the beginning.

“With the ‘slow start’ approach, we can pull the trigger to start mining, knowing that we still have a few weeks before it gets to be significantly valuable, giving us time to watch for failures, work on related operational things (updating our web site, dealing with getting hacked and defaced and all that, collaborating with wallet makers, exchange operators, and other partners, touring the world to visit stadiums of screaming fans, etc.),” Wilcox wrote on GitHub back in March.

But some in the Zcash forum argue, in the case of Zcash, where there is so much buzz around the coin, major players may jump into the game right away, and the difficulty will soar beyond the reach of the average CPU within hours or days.

TY13R (as he is known on the Zcash Slack channel) who handles community outreach and PR for Zcash, told Bitcoin Magazine:

“When they publish the first block, a huge a amount of hashing power will move over to it. There could be hundreds of blocks mined on the first day.”

Like Bitcoin, the plan is to only produce 21M tokens with a halving every four years, where the reward is halved to control inflation. However, unlike Bitcoin, for the first four years, a full 20 percent of the Zcash mining reward will go to stakeholders in the Zcash Company. This is known as the “Founders Reward.”

Exchanges and Wallets

If you’re not up for mining, another option is to simply buy Zcash tokens. Coins will be sparse until there is enough in the supply system. But, said TY13R, “If there is money to be made, people will sell. It all depends on whether the miners are willing to give up their ZEC.”

Several exchanges — including Poloniex, Bittrex, HitBTC, and Kraken — have already announced support for Zcash.

Shapeshift has also said that its platform will support ZEC as soon as liquidity allows. Erik Voorhees, CEO of ShapeShift, said to Bitcoin Magazine:

“Just as we should expect privacy in our emails, telephone calls and personal relationships, so too is privacy warranted in financial transactions. In our age of surveillance, the individual deserves every tool of empowerment, and Zcash has the potential to uphold this principle.”

Along with Trezor wallets by SatoshiLabs, Jaxx has revealed it will integrate Zcash a few days after the launch, making Zcash the fifth token Jaxx has added to its lineup in less than three months.

“VCs have invested in Zcash, there’s cutting edge security technology behind it and that’s resulted in quite a lot of chatter in the crypto community,” said Jaxx CEO Anthony Di Iorio. “Zcash holds an extraordinary amount of promise.”

The Case for Zcash

As of this writing, the price of Zcash futures is hovering at around 1.4 bitcoin or $950 on BitMEX. If those numbers are any premonition, Zcash could well become the second highest valued digital currency on record behind Bitcoin

Zcash represents the hope for a perfectly untraceable digital currency. Although progress is being made, at this point, Bitcoin transactions are traceable. This lack of fungibility, the idea that one bitcoin may not be as valuable as another, based on how it has been used in the past, has long been a threat to Bitcoin’s livelihood.

“You need fungibility for Bitcoin to function. If you receive coins and can't spend them, then you start to doubt whether you can spend them,” Blockstream CEO Adam Back told the audience at the Scaling Bitcoin conference in Madrid.

The hope is that Zcash finally solves that problem, using the established cryptographic protocol, zk-Snarks. The basic idea is that when you make a transaction, you give a proof that says you have access to a certain amount of funds, but that proof gives zero knowledge to other people about what those funds are. (That is the "zk" part). The "SNARK" part is that Zcash can do this fairly efficiently now, especially compared to ZeroCoin, its precursor.

But Wilcox’s own words capture the aspirations of Zcash the best. In an earlier interview with Bitcoin Magazine, he said:

“The dream is that people all around the world use Zcash and other cryptocurrencies directly, to cooperate and organize with one another in safety and privacy. This will give them freedom from corrupt regimes, banks and unstable national currencies.”

Whether or not Zcash lives up to this dream, only time will tell. As it states on its website, Zcash still considers itself “an experimental technology” and cautions, “there is risk involved.” But for many people who wish they had jumped into Bitcoin earlier, those cautions may go unheard.

Today marks the release of Bitcoin Core version 0.13.1. This is the official introduction of Segregated Witness, the long-awaited centerpiece of Bitcoin Core’s scalability road map. Starting November 15, Bitcoin miners can signal support for the proposed protocol upgrade, which, if activated, enables a number of new features on the Bitcoin network as well as an effective block size limit increase.

According to Bitcoin Core developer and Ciphrex Co-CEO, Eric Lombrozo, “Segregated Witness is the biggest extension of the protocol to date.”

Segregated Witness

Segregated Witness is a proposed upgrade to the Bitcoin protocol first introduced by Bitcoin Core and Blockstream developer, Dr. Pieter Wuille, at the Scaling Bitcoin conference in Hong Kong in December of 2015. The technological innovation separates signature data from Bitcoin transactions. This has several advantages, including — but not limited to — a malleability fix, more flexible programmability, and an effective block size limit increase.

“It's the most significant improvement to the protocol to date, and lots of exciting innovations become possible as a result,” Lombrozo told Bitcoin Magazine. “We're going through a period of tremendous innovation in Bitcoin — the greatest innovations since Bitcoin’s inception are taking place right now.”

Segregated Witness has been in the pipeline for almost year. Wuille started coding it in November 2015, and was joined by Lombrozo, Johnson Lau and several other Bitcoin Core developers in the following months. Counting almost 5,000 lines of code, Segregated Witness was completed last April.

Since that time, the proposed innovation has been subject to rigorous checks and analysis. Lombrozo explained:

“We’ve done a lot of review, and a lot of testing. We’ve had three dedicated Segregated Witness test networks, and it has been successfully running on Bitcoin’s main testnet since May. Additionally, compact blocks had to be developed and integrated in Bitcoin Core to mitigate latency and bandwidth issues. This was included in the latest version, 0.13.0.”

Activation will follow the standards as established by Bitcoin Improvement Improsal (BIP)9. This means that, within a single difficulty period of 2016 blocks (about two weeks), at least 95 percent of blocks must be mined by a miner that signals support for Segregated Witness. If this threshold is reached, the following difficulty period allows everyone who wants to upgrade the chance to do so. After that, Segregated Witness support is activated, and Segregated Witness transactions are accepted by Bitcoin miners.

Signaling will start on November 15. In the earliest possible scenario, this means that Segregated Witness could activate by mid-December. That seems somewhat unlikely at this time, however. A relatively new Chinese mining pool — ViaBTC — recently indicated it will not support a Segregated Witness soft fork. As ViaBTC currently controls about 9 percent of all hash power on the network, it could effectively block activation — assuming it remains above at least 5 percent.

Lombrozo indicated that the Bitcoin Core development team is not too worried, however.

“Changes to the consensus rules are hard by design,” he said. “In this case, I think the benefits vastly outweigh the risks, as Segregated Witness enables a bunch of new innovation in Bitcoin that will improve scalability and will allow for more use cases. My hope is that miners will appreciate these great benefits and will want to take advantage of this significant improvement to the protocol.”

If Segregated Witness is not supported by 95 percent of hash power by November 15, 2017, it can no longer activate. Until then, it’s unlikely that Bitcoin Core developers will present an alternative proposal, Lombrozo said.

“We've worked very hard to find a path forward that gives everyone in the ecosystem something they want,” said Lombrozo. “It's not always possible to please everyone, but we've made a great effort. We put this forward for the community. I hope the community appreciates our work and likes what we've done. At this point, it's in the community's hands to decide its fate.”

Synechron, a consulting services and technology provider specializing in the financial services market, has announced a partnership with Ethereum blockchain developers ConsenSys and BlockApps to develop next generation blockchain solutions. These solutions will address critical issues, such as data privacy on a private blockchain, scalability for market data applications and critical interoperability across Ethereum and complementary technologies.

“While blockchain has the potential to be a transformative technology, financial institutions need highly-customized applications that take into consideration their business operations and unique technical requirements,” said Synechron Co-Founder and CEO, Faisal Husain. “We’re delighted to be working with ConsenSys and BlockApps to collaborate with them on the next generation of blockchain infrastructure financial institutions will need for blockchain adoption. As those changes are made, Synechron will be the first to implement them and make them ready for financial services to accelerate adoption across banks.”

In September, New York based Synechron launched its Blockchain Accelerator Program and their six first blockchain applications in the cloud (Accelerators) for trade finance, KYC utilities, payments, smart margins, mortgages, and insurance claims. According to the company, the new applications enable financial services firms to prototype solid blockchain applications within weeks.

Now, ConsenSys and BlockApps will provide Synechron with specialized development tools, such as ConsenSys’s Ethereum blockchain development tools and BlockApps’ Ethereum blockchain infrastructure STRATO, which could enable new accelerators for total return swaps, call spreads, syndicated loans, bond issuance, tokenized securities and tokenized fiat currencies. In return, ConsenSys and BlockApps will be able to leverage Synechron’s customer base and — with a 6,000-person global team of specialized consultants — extensive presence in the financial services sector.

“ConsenSys is advising providers and financial services firms on how to evolve the technologies to address evolutionary issues like scalability, interoperability and data privacy,” said ConsenSys Founder and CEO Joseph Lubin. “Synechron will allow us to amplify the speed of adoption of these new technology capabilities as they are introduced to blockchain infrastructures, so that their clients are working on the absolute latest technologies. In addition to this bandwidth extension, Synechron’s specialized financial services knowledge has already been a valuable feedback loop, so that we are setting our agenda to prioritize how to evolve the technology according to the unique needs of the financial services industry.”

It’s worth noting that ConsenSys and BlockApps have also partnered with Microsoft for Ethereum blockchain applications in the cloud. In November, Bitcoin Magazinecovered the announcement of ConsenSys’ partnership with Microsoft. In December, Microsoft and ConsenSys announced Ethereum Blockchain as a Service (EBaaS) on Azure — Microsoft’s cloud computing platform — to provide a single-click, cloud-based blockchain developer environment to Azure Enterprise clients and developers. In June, the two companies started developing an open source, blockchain-based identity system for people, products, apps and services. BlockApps’ STRATO was also chosen by Microsoft as a technology platform for customized blockchain ledgers, with support for Ethereum smart contracts, in EBaaS.

“BlockApps continues to deploy within enterprises throughout the world, and we’ve found Synechron to be an ideal partner to help scale and further increase education and adoption of our customizable product,” said BlockApps Co-Founder and CEO Victor Wong. “Synechron is a driving force in the financial services technology space, and their understanding and implementation of Ethereum blockchain solutions continues to show their commitment to bleeding-edge technology.”

In June, Bitcoin Magazineinterviewed Husain about the potential long-term impact of blockchain and other emerging technologies on the financial sector. According to the results of a study sponsored by Synechron, the combination of blockchain technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is poised to have a major impact on financial services over the next 10 years.

“Financial services are built on huge stacks of data, and so there is huge potential value in using AI to garner insights, predict patterns and help make decisions,” said Husain. It’s interesting to speculate about possible integration of AI-assisted modules in Synechron’s Blockchain Accelerator Program.

The first hour we talked with Will Pangman about Airbitz Edge Login and the new funding rounds from WeFunder.The second hour we talk with Jason King and Lisa Klatt from Unsung.org about a really cool event this Saturday October 29 at Austin's Park and Pizza with the Central Texas Food Bank, Dash.org, Unsung.org and Arcade.City.This is a great opportunity to show the general public what we're able to do Crypto Currency.

Blockchain company Gem aims to tackle one of the biggest issues in health care insurance claim payments: providers have to wait a long time to get paid. Moving toward that goal, the ambitious startup just scored a major partnership with Capital One.

In a recent press release, Capital One announced it is “reinventing” its treasury management platform to include, among other things, advances in health care claims applications. As part of that, the financial conglomerate is partnering with several digital technology providers, including Gem.

“Blockchain technology connects the ecosystem to universal infrastructure, and shared infrastructure allows global standards that do not compromise privacy and security,” said Capital One in its press statement.

“When providers don’t get paid in a timely fashion, it creates inefficiencies that echo across the entire ecosystem, and this is a massive issue in health care,” explained Emily Vaughn, Director of Client Relations and Marketing for Gem.

Gem’s core product is GemOS, an abstraction layer designed to make blockchains useful for enterprise clients by connecting their existing software to shared ledgers. According to Vaughn, GemOS is similar to an operating system, in that it serves as a platform for managing data, identities and rules on a blockchain.

To get an idea of how this works consider that, in a basic workflow revenue cycle, the health care provider will creates a claim. They in turn send it to the payer, who then approves or denies the payment portion of it. Then the payer sends that information to their bank, who then sends money to the provider’s bank.

In that workflow, you have four companies all running on different systems trying to communicate about the same event. On a shared ledger, you need instead four identities, four permissioned users on the network.

The GemOS key management service creates identities for the payer, provider and their respective banks, using hierarchical deterministic (HD) identity keychains. HD keychains were invented to secure bitcoin and are now the industry standard. They allow the user to have a secret key that generates many public keys to protect the identity of the user.

“Like a bitcoin wallet, your blockchain identity can store data, such as credentials, ” said Vaughn. “You use that identity to sign transactions, which is now visible to other users who could be using different software. We call this, Multiparty Identity and Access Management.”

In that sense, GemOS acts like a permission layer between different blockchains, controlling who should have access to data stored in disparate siloed systems, as well as when they should have that access.

It is not uncommon for large enterprises to have critical data spread across different systems that don’t communicate well with one another. In the health care industry, those interoperability issues can lead to payments delays and other problems, like patients not having access to a complete aggregated view of their health. But privacy is also a huge issue in health care, making it doubly difficult to gain access to enterprise systems.

Earlier this month, at the Distributed: Health conference in Nashville, Tennessee, Gem introduced its Revenue Cycle Management (RCM), a pilot project that runs on the GemOS platform and is supported by the Gem Health Network, a network for developing applications and shared infrastructure for healthcare powered by the Ethereum blockchain.

“The Gem Health Network is the blockchain network we spun out so our customers can build applications in a sandbox environment where they can test their application’s ability to leverage a shared infrastructure, which is the blockchain network,” said Vaughn.

Philips Blockchain Lab, a research and development center of healthcare giant Philips, was the first major healthcare operator to partner with Gem. Capital One is now the second.

“At Capital One we see the new network models and data analytics capabilities as an exciting opportunity to reinvent treasury management to better meet the needs of clients, not only increasing payment efficiency but also generating actionable information about their business,” Capital One Executive Vice President, Patrick Moore, said.

Nearly a year ago, Capital One was one of several financial industry players to invest a total of $30 million in Chain.com, a blockchain developer platform that serves the fintech industry. Its current partnership with Gem marks the first time Capital One has publicly announced the intention to use a blockchain in one of its actual products.